Guard Frequency Episode 484 | A Weird and Inadequate Variety of Tedium

Cits and Civs, Captains and Commanders, you’re tuned to episode 484 of Guard Frequency — the best damn space game podcast ever! This episode was recorded on Friday, April 12 and released for streaming and download on Tuesday, April 16, 2024 at GuardFrequency.com

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This Week’s Schedule

• Flight Deck
  • Elite: Dangerous
  • Star Citizen
  • Helldivers 2
  • Hunternet Starfighter
• Guard Frequency Origins, where the real preemptive volleys were the friends we made along the way
• Feedback Loop

Links & The Like

Elite: Dangerous

Elite Dangerous tried to slow down the runaway freight train that is the Thargoid Titan narrative. The next Titan marked for death, Titan Oya, unleashed a torrent of Orthrus scouts on about 30 star systems last week. That has never happened before, and Frontier, via the Galnet news service, encouraged players to beat back the swarm by spending hours hunting down and killing Orthrus Scouts. The playerbase responded with a resounding “meh” and did the exact opposite. The good news is that the players defeated the Titan’s expansion efforts. The bad news is that FDev’s thumb is definitely on the scale. Also, Frontier’s social media team is trying to learn the lessons in “expectation-setting” we tried to teach. So, instead of promising a deep dive into a game feature, they actually delivered a “Sneak Peek” into the next Frontier unlocked segment. That “sneak peek” was a screen shot of three Frontier employees on a Zoom call. [Sigh] OK, we’re gonna need to work on this some more. Finally, Tony was mostly wrong, and that’s all he’ll commit to saying in writing.

Star Citizen

Star Citizen released Early Access Pre-Alpha Release Candidate Prototype Experimental Test Build 3.23.0-EPTU.9141366 to the Wave 1 PTU this week. So it’s almost ready to go, but it is leaving behind some features that were “not ready for testing” while it was in the Evocati branch. If this were the old days, we’d say something like: CIG has updated the Progress tracker by taking a few features off “Committed” status for 3.23 and put it on “Working” status for 3.24. But CIG hasn’t updated the Progress Tracker since Citizen Con 2023, so we aren’t going to say anything like that. Also, the new Starmap UI is cool and futuristic and evocative of the Iron Man heads up display. And just like Tony Stark’s HUD, you’ll need a smooth British voiceover to tell you what it says – because there’s no way you’re gonna be able to read it yourself. And, believe it or not, Citizen Con 2024 is only six months away, and tickets are on sale now!

Helldivers 2 & Hunternet Starfighter

Helldivers 2 released a new warbond this week, and this one is all about the ‘splosions! They’ve also addressed a pressing problem encountered by the highest-ranked players: full piggy banks. And Fernando posted a discussion about death in Hunternet Starfighter that needs some unpacking and discussion, so that’s what we’re gonna do.

Community Questions

• Talk to us about dying in Hunternet Starfighter. What sort of “death penalty” should be imposed in a game where “you” don’t matter, but your faction does?
• Is there anything on the missing feature list we discussed that you believe must be included in the MVP?

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